Cooperation among nodes is fundamental for the operation of mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs).
In such networks, there could be selfish nodes that use resources from other nodes to send their packets
but that do not offer their resources to forward packets for other nodes.Thus,a cooperation
enforcement mechanism is necessary. Trust models have been proposed as mechanisms to incentive
cooperation in MANET sand some of them are based on game theory concepts. Among game theoretic
trust models, those that make nodes’ strategies evolve genetically have shown promising results for
cooperation improvement. However,current approaches propose a highly centralized genetic evolution
which render them unfeasible for practical purposes in MANETs. In this article, we propose a trust model based on a non-cooperative game that uses a bacterial-like algorithm to let the nodes quickly
learn the appropriate cooperation behavior. Our model is completely distributed, achieves optimal
cooperation values in a small fraction of time compared with centralized algorithms,and adapts
effectively to environmental changes.